I do a lot of black and white line drawings that I would like to vectorize for use with my CNC machine. I normally scan the drawings in at 600 DPI, then clean up the bitmap a little bit. My end goal is to have a nice vectorized drawing similar to what the centerline bitmap trace puts out. The centerline trace does a terrible, unusable job. It generates thousands of points, which is very difficult to clean up and doesn't trace accurately at all. All of the outline trace options give me great looking vector drawings, except that for every line in my drawing there is a curve drawn on each side of every line. That doesn't work very well with my CNC software.
I have mostly just switched to tracing the image by hand using beziers. This works, but seems slow. It really seems like there should be an automated way to do this. Does anyone have any suggestions? Is there something I should be doing with my input files? Is there a technique I could use to make this easier?
I sure can. I usually use .png, but this one is a .gif
I could get close in Draw after trying a few time. One area of feathers is filled. I am sure there is a way to fix it, probably some winding rule problem. I outlined traced set to two colors, high detail, smoothing at 25, corner smoothing at 0. The top is the trace result. I ungrouped that, and found one group that I could drag to the side. This left some underlying stuff that was unwanted. I added a stroke/outline. I tried to convert that to an object, but Draw complained it was too complex. So I went back, used the reduce nodes to reduce the number of nodes. This time it could convert the outline to object. I added a black box to add contrast. I also added an additional stroke just to make it more visible. That wouldn't be wanted sending to a cutting or burning machine.
Just for the heck of it I tried in Inkscape. Tracing with Brightness Steps set to 8 makes a group of 7 objects that appear identical. Deleting the other 6, outlining it, converting the stroke to an object I get this result. I put black behind it so it is easier to see. All in all it was quicker in Inkscape.
Here is the Draw result again blown up. Hard to see otherwise. Again, I used an added stoke just to make it visible.